Your Callsign Explained

In this post, I detail what your callsign is, where to find it, and how to make a new callsign!

What is My Callsign?

Your callsign is whatever you want it to be. You can check around the cockpit of your aircraft (if it is a default aircraft) and you should find a little plate with around six letters and numbers (ex. N172SP) which you could use as your callsign. If there is not a plate in the cockpit, look outside your aircraft and you should see a six-digit code that is your default callsign.

Regardless of what the code is, you can choose whatever you want for signing on to VATSIM.

What Should a Callsign Include?

If you are making a custom callsign for your aircraft, there are correct ways and wrong ways to write it. There are two different types of callsigns: general aviation and airline callsigns.

If you are flying a general aviation aircraft registered in the USA, or for VATSIM purposes, flying in the USA, then your callsign will start with N aka November. It should include five digits of letters and numbers after November. For more technical information, head to this Wikipedia page about aircraft registration!

For airline callsigns, it is simpler, you use the code for the airline (American Airlines is AAL, United Airlines is UAL, etc.), plus up to four numbers. An example of an airline callsign isAAL563. When ATC is talking to you, they say your airline instead of its code.

That’s it for this week’s post, please subscribe to my blog to get notified when more content comes out! Also, please correct me in the comments if I got any information wrong.